In this paper, the characteristics of microwave propagation channels in drill pipe bore are analyzed by regarding the drill pipe as an irregular lossy cylindrical waveguide. An attenuation law is modeled using multipath propagation theory and an experimental statistical method. It is shown from physical measurement results that 5″ and $5^{1/2 \prime \prime} $ drill pipe bores, widely applied in the field of air drilling, can be used as 2.4 GHz band microwave channels with the caveat that the numerous reflective surfaces in the joint section of the drill pipe produce a great deal of reflected waves. Hence, the drill pipe bore has the characteristics of a dual cluster multipath channel, and multipath fading and delay are the primary factors affecting propagation quality. The study's constructed microwave attenuation model, based on multipath channels, can be regarded as the average attenuation of the unit length in the drill pipe bore, and can be used as the basis for simulation and analysis of the longer drill pipe string. In addition, a large delay between the two clusters leads to a significant increase of the root mean square delay spread. Consequently, multipath fading and delay are the main factors affecting the channel transmission rate.

The control of cutoffs is of great interest in designs of circular waveguides. In this paper, this topic is investigated for pure transverse-electric (TE) and transverse-magnetic (TM) modes by taking advantage of anisotropic reactance lining loadings. It is found that the cutoffs of TE and TM modes are determined by the reactance in the azimuthal and axial directions, respectively. When the reactance values are positive, the cutoff frequencies are lower than those of a normal conducting waveguide with the same cross-section. However, in contrast to the claim made in the previous literature that the negative reactance values caused the same reducing effect on the cutoffs as the positive values did, the cutoffs are found to be increased by the negative reactances. The theoretical results are validated by the simulations using commercial software, where a delicate model with an approximate curved anisotropic impedance boundary is proposed for the first time. By lowering the TE cutoffs and raising the TM ones, some intriguing applications, such as single-mode bandwidth extension and degenerate mode avoidance, are predicted, which would pave a way for designs of novel waveguide devices.

In through the wall imaging systems, wall parameters like its thickness and dielectric constant play an important role in the true and correct image formation of an object behind the wall made of various materials like brick cement, wood, plastic, etc. Incorrect estimation of these parameters leads to dislocation of the object and smearing or blurriness of the image too. A new autofocusing technique for a stepped frequency continuous wave -based radar at the frequency of 1–3 Ghz has been developed that corrects the wall's parameters like its thickness and dielectric constant and provides a better focused image of the target. For this purpose, a peak signal to noise ratio -based autofocusing technique has been developed by using curve fitting and the genetic algorithm. It is observed that the proposed technique has capability to focus the image up to good extent.

The paper presents the results of studies on the effect of transistor DC operating conditions on GaN power amplifiers’ (PAs) power efficiency and linearity improved by digital predistortion (DPD). The single-ended 10 W (ISM2.45 GHz) and 150 W (3.4/3.6 GHz) GaN HEMT PAs excited by wideband LTE20 E-TM1.1 signal were tested. To check the applicability of the small-signal approach for designing of LTE signals’ PAs, the 150 W PA using transistor model extracted from S-parameters measured at the properly selected operating points was designed. The conventional DPD based on the indirect learning architecture and the memory polynomial model of PA non-linearity was implemented. The results of the research show that in case of class A and B PAs operating up to several dozen watts, an additional improvement in adjacent channel leakage ratio (ACLR) of the order of a few dB only by an increase in the quiescent drain current of PA transistor can be achieved. However, a noticeable ACLR improvement with a coincident increase in power-added efficiency (PAE) can be obtained by choosing the compromise DC operating point and using DPD. In the case of high-PAs, the linearity and efficiency are strongly dependent on the load of a transistor, thus the role of DPD is significantly increased.

In this study, a new ultra-wideband (UWB) band-edge selectivity antenna with a modified radiation slot using defected ground structure (DGS) is presented to obtain bandpass filtering reflection coefficient and gain performance. The well-designed DGS is designed on backside metallic of the substrate and can be seen as a low-pass filter that provides a good roll-off at a higher frequency. By connecting the DGS and the stepped slot and making them merge with each other, good cut-off property in the upper passband and better in-band impedance characteristics are obtained. Measured results show that the proposed design not only shows good band-edge selectivity in reflection coefficient and gain performance but also has a good impedance matching of −13.5 dB reflection coefficients and a good radiation efficiency of 90% in the operating frequencies. The measured bandwidth defined with the reflection coefficient less than −10 dB is from 3.1–11.2 GHz. Furthermore, the size of the filtering UWB antenna is 22 mm × 12 mm, which is smaller than many individual UWB antennas and UWB filters.

In this paper, a flexible single fed planar circular polarized slot antenna is proposed for Internet of Things wideband applications. The antenna flexibility is achieved by employing a mechanically bendable liquid crystalline polymer substrate. The overall antenna volume is 50 mm × 42 mm × 0.1 mm. The antenna design uses 45° rotated elliptical ground structure for generating circular polarized radiation over wideband spectrum. Two parametrical analyses targeting the slot ground are introduced in order to achieve the most efficient design. The final antenna design demonstrates a good matching in terms of reflection coefficient (<−10 dB), semi-omnidirectional radiation patterns, average gain of 4 dB, and <3 dB axial ratio over entire frequency band of operation. All antenna parameters are studied in both straight and bent antenna setup scenarios. Good agreement between simulation and measurement results of the antenna parameters are achieved. For both straight and bent antenna scenarios, the antenna receiving functionality in time domain is confirmed by retrieving highly correlated impulse responses.

This paper presents a comparison of chip connections using aerosol jet (AJ) and bond technology on low-cost printed circuit board (PCB) substrates. First, the behavior of the used gap filler material and the used silver ink for AJ technology on PCBs are characterized. In addition to comparing the radio frequency (RF) performance (DC to 67 GHz) of the two technologies, the mechanical stability is also compared. While the AJ technology transitions score above all for their RF performance and the lower requirements (surface finish, pad size, and adhesion) on the PCB, the bonding technology has clear advantages, especially with a different coefficient of thermal expansion values of the substrates to be connected. Finally, the measurement results of a complete package are shown, whereby the chip connection is realized once by means of AJ and once by bonding wires.

A compact wideband out-of-phase power divider (PD) with improved isolation performance is proposed. This divider is formed by connecting an additional stub for isolation to output ports of a traditional Marchand balun with a defected ground structure (DGS) been used. To verify the design, a prototype divider is fabricated and tested. The measured results validate the 53.86% band-width centered at 3.43 GHz with more than 15 dB return loss at all ports, more than 17 dB isolation, respectively.

In this paper, a microstrip lowpass filter using rectangular resonators is designed. To weaken the undesired harmonics from 10 to 20 GHz, a stair-shaped suppressing cell and also high impedance elements at the edges are utilized. It should be noted that for analyzing the proposed filter, an LC model is used and the design is done in such a way that the coupling effects of the close-up lines are reduced as much as possible, so that they are ignored in the circuit analysis. The designed filter has a cut-off frequency of 1.01 GHz and the transition band is only 0.1 GHz. In addition to compression of dimensions, the stopband bandwidth is 18.7 times the cut-off frequency (18.7 × fc). The attenuation rate in the passband reaches 0.081 dB which indicates that the passband is flat. In the stopband, disturbing harmonics have been dampened to −23.5 dB and a good bandwidth is achieved. The figure of merit of the proposed filter is 180 387 and it is a good benchmark for the overall comparison of the proposed filter with the previous works.

The implementation of stable, accurate, and wideband second-order microwave integrators (SOMIs) is presented in this paper. These designs of SOMIs are obtained by using different combinations of transmission line sections and shunt stubs in cascading. Particle swarm optimization (PSO), cuckoo search algorithm (CSA), and gravitational search algorithm (GSA) are applied to obtain the optimal values of the characteristic impedances of these line elements to approximate the magnitude response of ideal second-order integrator (SOI). The performance measure criteria for the proposed SOMIs are carried out based on magnitude response, absolute magnitude error, phase response, convergence rate, pole-zero plot, and improvement graph. The simulation results and statistical analysis demonstrate that GSA surpasses the PSO and CSA to approximate the ideal SOI in all state-of-the-art, that is eligible for wide-band microwave integrator. The designed SOMI is compact in size and suitable to cover microwave applications. The magnitude errors for the proposed SOMIs GSA based are as low as 4.9954 and 3.6573, respectively. The structure of the designed SOMI is implemented in the form of microstrip line on RT/Duroid substrate with dielectric constant 2.2 and having height 0.762 mm. The simulated and measured magnitude result agrees well with the ideal one in the frequency range of 3–15 GHz.

A broadband linear polarized antenna is designed for radio frequency energy harvesting. The antenna covers the frequency range from 1 up to 6 GHz with relative impedance bandwidth of 126% at −6 dB reflection coefficient |S11| and extended from 1.1 to 3.3 GHz and from 4.2 to 5.6 GHz at |S11| ≤ −10 dB. A 2 × 2 dual linear polarized (DLP) antenna array is designed based on the antenna element by using equal phase and equal power divider 1-to-4 Wilkinson power divider with 180° phase shifter. The DLP antenna array covers the frequency band from 1.8 to 2.9 GHz. This frequency band covers a wide range of modern wireless communication standards, including GSM 1800, UMTS 2100, Wi-Fi 2.4, and most of LTE bands. The developed array prototype was then used to experimentally validate the simulation results. The horizontally and vertically polarized gain of the designed array were found to be quite similar across the 1.8–2.9 frequency band with an average gain value of 5.5 dBi.

This paper proposes a new radar cross section (RCS) reduced microstrip antenna incorporating 475 square slots on the patch. The proposed antenna achieves wideband RCS reduction with radiation performance sustained. The modified and reference antenna are simulated and analyzed in radiating and scattering mode, respectively. Prototypes of two antennas are fabricated and measured. Compared with the reference antenna, the simulated result shows the modified antenna RCS reduced in the frequency range 1.1–2.6 GHz, which contains the in-band and out-of-band frequency band simultaneously. And the maximum RCS reduction is 7.6dB at the frequency of 1.19GHz. Besides, the modified antenna can achieve the antenna RCS reduction in the case of oblique incidence. The prototypes of two antennas are fabricated and measured, and the accuracy of the simulation is proved by the measured result. Due to its advantages of simplicity, wideband RCS reduced, broad-angle RCS reduced, the method in this paper is suitable for wideband antenna RCS reduction in space-limited environment.

Electromagnetic wave of enemy radar propagated by troposcatter is a valuable candidate for beyond line-of-sight detection. There is no analytical study considering the operating range of passive troposcatter detection system. In this paper, we study the way to predict the operating range, which is dominated by propagation loss. The key propagation loss models including statistic model and real-time model are analyzed. During deducing the latter loss model, Hopfield model is introduced to precisely describe the tropospheric refractivity. Meanwhile, rain attenuation is also taken into consideration. Several examples demonstrate the feasibility of predicting operating range through the proposed method.

In this paper, design and development of a via-free composite right/left handed transmission line (CRLH TL)-based diplexer for WiMAX and WLAN bands is reported. The diplexer is having two channels, where each channel consists of a separate bandpass filter (BPF). The BPF of both channels are designed on via-free CRLH TLs based on a newly proposed right-angled corner-modified split ring resonator (RAC-MSRR) structure. The RAC-MSRR incorporates meander paths because of which working scope of frequencies is focused for measured center frequencies (f1) 3.5 GHz with −3 dB fractional bandwidth (FBW) of 21.21% (BPF1 channel) and (f2) 5.6 GHz with −3 dB FBW of 13.29% (BPF2 channel). For diplexer design, T-section is used for joining two BPFs which results in very good isolation of more than 32.5 dB over the frequency band of 2.5–8.0 GHz. The designed diplexer has passband insertion loss of −0.87 dB at f1 and −1.25 dB at f2. Overall size of the fabricated diplexer including 50 Ω feed line is 18 × 15 mm2. Equivalent lumped circuit model parameters of the diplexer are obtained from the pseudo-inverse matrix technique. Measured results show good concurrence with simulated results and subsequently approve the proposed model design.

In the area of electromagnetic metrology, binary coded excitation signals become more and more important and various binary coded sequences are available. The measurement approach is to assess the impulse response function of a device under test by correlating the response signal with the excitation signal. In order to achieve a high measurement reproducibility as well as a high dynamic range, the generated binary coded signals have to provide low-noise. In this contribution, a low-noise signal generator realized with a field programmable gate array is presented. The performance investigation of different kinds of binary coded excitation signals and different correlation concepts have been practically investigated. With a chip rate of 5 Gchip/s, the generator can be utilized for ultra-wideband applications. In order to allow for a low-noise and long-term stable signal generation, a new clock generator concept is presented and results of phase noise measurements are shown. Furthermore, an algorithm to fast and precisely shifting the time lag between two binary coded signals for correlating excitation and response signals with a hardware correlator is presented. Finally, the realized demonstrator system is tested using two commonly used types of binary coded sequences.

This paper presents two modifications of compressive sensing (CS)-based approach applied to the near-field diagnosis of active phased arrays. CS-based antenna array diagnosis allows a significant reduction of measurement time, which is crucial for the characterization of electrically large active antenna arrays, e.g. used in synthetic aperture radar. However, practical implementation of this method is limited by two factors: first, it is sensitive to thermal instabilities of the array under test, and second, excitation reconstruction accuracy strongly depends on the accuracy of the elements of the measurement matrix. First proposed modification allows taking into account of thermal instability of the array by using an iterative ℓ1-minimization procedure. The second modification increases the accuracy of reconstruction using several simple additional measurements.

A series of compact filtering power dividers (FPDs) with simple layouts are proposed based on coupling topology. The structure of the presented FPD1 is composed of three resonators and one isolating resistor. These FPDs can be designed based on coupling matrix filter theory. A half-wave transmission line is employed in FPD2 to introduce a transmission zero (TZ) locating at 1.27f0. The FPD3 is designed by replacing quarter-wave transmission lines in FPD2 with quarter-wave coupled lines, which will produce a TZ locating at 1.96 f0 and extend upper stopband bandwidth. For verification, three FPDs centered at 2.45 GHz are fabricated and measured. All measured results are in good agreement with the full-wave simulation results.

Now-a-days, far-field wireless power transfer/energy harvesting is underutilized due to the unavailability of proper methodology to design efficient system for maximum radio frequency (RF) power utilization. For efficient utilization of far-field RF energy an array/grid of rectenna, i.e. rectenna panel is required to generate the power from wireless signal. To minimize the engineering design phase period (design trials), this paper mathematically derives and summarizes the approach required for optimum rectenna panel design based on power available in the environment, RF transmit source capability, receiver power requirement and the design cost. For maximum power interception through a rectenna panel, its design parameters such as -panel size, number of rectenna, rectenna arrangement pattern, and rectenna spacing has been optimized in our work. Based on the optimization required, we have proposed the compact grid pattern with heterogeneous rectenna spacing. It has been proved theoretically in this paper that if a hexagonal shape panel is designed by placement of rectenna at vertices of equilateral triangle (with side length governed by antenna aperture) then, it is capable of intercepting maximum RF energy available at its location with the least number of rectenna.

In this paper, a compact, low-profile, coplanar waveguide-fed metamaterial inspired dual-band microstrip antenna is presented for Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) application. To achieve the goal a triangular split ring resonator is used along with an open-ended stub. The proposed antenna has a compact size of 20 × 24 mm2 fabricated on an FR-4 epoxy substrate with dielectric constant (εr) 4.4. The antenna provides two distinct bands I from 2.40 to 2.48 GHz and II from 4.7 to 6.04 GHz with reflection coefficient better than −10 dB, covering the entire WLAN (2.4/5.2/5.8 GHz) band spectrum. The performance of the proposed metamaterial inspired antenna is also studied in terms of the radiation pattern, efficiency, and the realized gain. A comparative study is also presented to show the performance of the proposed metamaterial inspired antenna with respect to other conventional antenna structures in terms of overall size, bandwidth, gain, and reflection coefficient. Finally, the antenna is fabricated and tested. The simulated results show good agreement with the measured results.

This article presents the configuration and technical specification of the passive radar exploiting third-party transmitters of second-generation digital video broadcasting standard DVB-T2 as illuminators of opportunity. The performance of the two-dimensional (2D) passive radar estimated based on theoretical and experimental study is described. The possible configuration of the 2D non-equidistant antenna array for the three-dimensional (3D) passive radar is proposed to ensure the 3D localization of detected targets. The experimental results on drone detection conducted with the 3D passive radar show that the radar with the 2D antenna array is capable to measure not only azimuth but also elevation and consequently target altitude.